Jimmy Carter never had a SCOTUS pick. He still transformed the judiciary
President Jimmy Carter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg at a reception for female judges on Oct. 3, 1980. (National Archives and Records Administration)
For President Jimmy Carter, the indignities were many. Unable to secure the freedom of the American hostages in Iran, powerless against an inflation crisis, challenged by a member of his own party in the 1980 presidential primary then voted out after one term—the first president to meet this humbling fate since Herbert Hoover in 1932.
Not only that, but Carter—who died Dec. 29 at 100—never got to nominate a Supreme Court justice.
Because of that last distinction, his judicial record is often ignored when considering his presidency. But Carter actually appointed more judges to the federal bench than any other president has done in a single term, according to the Office of the U.S. Courts. He appointed five times more women and three times more people of color than all previous presidents combined. Two of his picks—Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer—later became Supreme Court justices.
It’s a little-acknowledged legacy detailed by historian Jonathan Alter in his 2021 book, “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life.”
Before Carter took office, he committed to using a semi-independent commission for his judicial nominations, and to apply affirmative action policies. He even promised Coretta Scott King, widow of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., that he would select one Black judge from every state that had once been part of the Confederacy, Alter wrote.
Still, his first 12 picks for the U.S. Courts of Appeal were all White men, a fact that did not go unnoticed by his feminist wife, first lady Rosalynn Carter. She pushed him to do better. He did.
In 1978, a post-Watergate, overwhelmingly Democratic Congress responded to a federal case backlog by passing a bill to increase the size of the federal bench by more than 150 seats, all of which could be filled by Carter. And that was in addition to the seats he would fill by normal attrition.
All told, he appointed 262 federal judges in just four years—more than Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton did in eight years, and more than Donald Trump, who has been noted for nominating federal judges at a furious pace. Of those 262, 55 were minorities and 40 were women.
Ginsburg was one of those women. When Carter took office, she was a fellow at Stanford University and already famous for supporting women’s rights before the Supreme Court. Like many others, she filled out a questionnaire to be considered for a judgeship.
Ginsburg’s husband, Martin Ginsburg, began a behind-the-scenes campaign for his wife, but there was significant pushback from many of the conservative Democrats in Carter’s orbit, who viewed her as “one-issue” or “too liberal,” according to Alter.
Help came from Sarah Weddington, the Texas attorney who, at 26, had successfully argued Roe v. Wade before the Supreme Court. She had joined the Carter administration as an aide for women’s issues and leaked Ginsburg’s name as a judicial pick to the press, hoping if it became public, then Carter wouldn’t be able to backtrack. As soon as Weddington leaked it, though, she went to the Oval Office and told the president what she’d done. He “didn’t mind,” Alter wrote.
Sandra Day O’Connor became the first female Supreme Court justice after she was nominated by Ronald Reagan in 1981. But had Carter gotten a chance to nominate a justice, it was widely believed he would have nominated a woman, specifically Shirley Hufstedler, a federal judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, who at the time was the most senior woman in the judiciary.
When Hufstedler graduated from Stanford’s law school in 1949, she struggled to find work, despite graduating at the top of her class. She did legal research and wrote briefs for other attorneys before starting her own practice, specializing in cases no one else would take, according to Stanford Lawyer Magazine. Eventually, she wrote briefs representing the state of California in a case heard before the Supreme Court and soon climbed the ladder as a judge.
In 1979, when Congress created the Department of Education, Carter named Hufstedler its first secretary. She later returned to private practice and died in 2016.
That same year, Ginsburg, by then the second woman on the Supreme Court, told PBS she was often asked if she had always wanted to be a judge. When she graduated from law school in 1959, she said, there were no women on the federal bench, so “it wouldn’t be a realistic ambition for a woman to want to become a federal judge.”
She added, “It wasn’t realistic until Jimmy Carter became our president.”
